One must grant from the start the difficulties involved in
reconciling the impulse of social transformation and the formal
exigencies of the art object. Joseph Nechvatal's work, or rather,
his "project" (which includes digital paintings,
photography, sculpture, mixed-media works, video, an audio-cassette
magazine, his own theoretical writings, and above all else, the
hybrid or mutant mechanical or technological processes, materials
and procedures that he has brought to bear upon all of these objects
and activities) has been utterly absorbed by these difficulties.
However, it must also be said from the start that Nechvatal's
practice has not been diminished by these difficulties; rather it
has specifically constituted itself through them, and been enhanced
by them, in that the work has neither fallen prey or succumbed to
the rhetoric and dogma of social transformation nor has it adopted a
comfortable or stable aesthetic or formal posture in relation to the
art object. Attention to the formal parameters of the object has not
bred complacency toward the Social; nor has regard for its social
parameters, and for social conditions in general, spawned formal
complacency in relation to the object. It has not disabled the
object or incapacitated it in any way, even where it has adopted a
form of stasis, critical stasis, to enable its relation to the
Social. On the contrary, attention to the social parameters of the
object, in Nechvatal, has defied the closure of responsible
positions.

One must grant these difficulties because it is necessary to
acknowledge that the requirements and nature or character of social
transformation and formal exigency are, if not antithetical, then
substantially disparate. This is to say that the requirements of the
former encompass an activity, whereas the latter (must) circumscribe
or delimit an object. Formal exigency privileges the object; or
rather, it must yield by definition a privileged object. Social
transformation, on the other hard, implies an action or activity, if
only an attitudinal one. It opposes by definition the stationary
condition of things (of the Social) as it would subvert the static
condition of the object. It is fundamentally a de-privileging
activity or action, that is, until this activity reifies, and then
turns into its opposite, subverting itself, by re-privileging its
new-found station as a critical activity per se. The moment it
objectifies this activity as critique, it re-privileges itself as a
critical object. If formal exigency yields the privileged object,
then social transformation reifies the privileged activity of
critique, yielding in its early stages the critique of privilege but
in its later stages the privilege of critique. In other words, the
critical object in the art world is no less privileged than the
formal object it critiques.

In Nechvatal's work there is the sense that the deprivileging
activity of critique and social transformation has itself undergone
a deprivileging, or rather, meta-deprivileging process Neither the
method nor the content of the formal object, neither the subject of
critique nor the critical method, are grounded or localized by a
focal point. Nothing is privileged in Nechvatal, not even the
working nothingness or stasis, or meta-stasis, of this non-focused
"nothing". There is no center, nor focal point in the
work, only a 'universal' field of attention that is itself on
(critical) overload, and as a consequence produces a static effect.
There is no 'cause' or sense of causality, no social or formal,
psychological or technological, ideological or logical, network of
cause and effect. Nothing is privileged in Nechvatal's scheme of
things; it is a universe that sustains or tolerates neither
subliminal nor superstructure privilege. And that will not even
tolerate this privilege of nothingness by default. The actuality of
this overload, the critical mass of thresholds that presses upon
this universal field of attention, the focal point of nothingness
that constitutes itself as the Spectacle in the contemporary world,
cannot be oriented or predetermined by the hierarchy of class
distinctions generated from a Marxist model. The all-over method of
the work, the arbitrary content of the negations, the abstract, non
relational grammar of discausal effects speak to groundlessness, to
closure as a critical threshold, to a non-focal model (or non model)
of "inside" and "outside", and to the
homelessness of the Social itself. This approach provides for the
luxury of peripheral vision and the marginal ethos of a radical
nothingness.

In short, Nechvatal has not only deprivileged the formal object,
he has deprivileged critique or the critical object itself; that is,
he has not only deprivileged the aesthetic dimension as the focal
point of the art object, he has also attempted to deprivilege
critique as the focus of social transformation. It may even be
argued that he has tried to deprivilege the notion or concept of
social transformation itself by deflecting attention away from
critique toward the actualities of desire and void-as-Value. The
attempt, then, is not only to deprivilege but to dereify social
transformation as a working model through the processes of
adulteration, mutation and hybridization. Ultimately, this
meta-deprivileging process approaches a critical threshold by
subjecting the model of social transformation, and its reified,
clandestine idealism, to the 'abstract", non-focal experience
of non experience. Here, again, one is confronted by the
destablizing, non ideological threshold or experience of desire and
critical stasis, by the forms that void-as-Value yields, and by the
absurd ethic that accompanies the critical threshold of closure
itself.

Ideology reflexive to the critique of representation is
ultimately reflexive to the ideology of representation. Both the
social and formal objects issued respectively by art or aesthetics
share an ideology of privileged representations. Nechvatal has
sought to undermine the self-reflexive nature of this ideology of
privileged representations through abstract, unreflexive, static
meta-activity. An activity that would interrupt the self-reflexive
function of the privileged object; a meta-activity that would
discontinue the formal privilege of the self-reflexive object and
the social privilege of self-reflexive critique; and a
meta-deprivileging activity that would cancel the meta-privilege of
self-reflexive activity itself. The irony, here, is that neither the
dynamic coordinates of social transformation nor coordinates of
social transformation nor the static coordinates of formal exigency
suffice to graph the nonrepresentational chimera of Nechvatal's
practice. In that his practice issues objects that encompass a
mental activity that deprivileges critique both as an object and as
a self-objectifying activity, his objects deny ideology the
satisfaction and privilege of representation.